Personal Multiplicity Theory

Chapter 2 – Psychology Frequently Encounters the Many

Introduction

The previous chapter began with a deliberately modest observation. Human beings can experience several motives, affects, evaluations or self-representations without ceasing to experience themselves as one continuing person.

That observation does not tell us what these differences are made of, nor does it establish that every internal disagreement represents a distinct psychological entity. It does, however, raise a historical question. If organised psychological differentiation is a genuine feature of human mental life, rather than an artefact created by the terminology of this thesis, then earlier psychologists should have encountered phenomena that strained a strictly unitary account of mind.

They did. The difficulty is that they encountered them for different reasons and described them using different conceptual systems. Pierre Janet investigated automatisms, dissociation and psychological activities that appeared outside the ordinary synthesis of consciousness.

Freud divided mental activity among agencies with different functions and relationships to conscious awareness.

Jung’s experimental and clinical work led him toward complexes capable of behaving with a striking degree of relative autonomy.

Dialogical Self Theory later described a self able to occupy several differing and even opposed positions, while contemporary parts-working approaches such as Internal Family Systems explicitly normalise psychological multiplicity.

The resemblance among these models is important, but it is also easy to exaggerate. Janet’s subconscious automatisms are not Freud’s id. Freud’s structural agencies are not Jung’s complexes. Jung’s complexes are not Hermans’s I-positions, and none of these can simply be relabelled as the parts or thought-forms proposed later in this thesis.

The historical significance lies elsewhere. Again and again, psychologists attempting to explain human behaviour have found that the mind becomes more intelligible when they permit some degree of organised internal differentiation.

That recurrence deserves examination in its own terms.

Janet and psychological activity outside the ordinary conscious synthesis

Pierre Janet provides one of the earliest systematic psychological examples. His 1889 doctoral thesis, L’Automatisme psychologique, was concerned principally with pathological and hypnotic phenomena rather than with a general theory of healthy multiplicity. That difference matters. Janet should not be recruited retrospectively as though he had already proposed the theory advanced here.

Nevertheless, the organisation of his argument is revealing. In the second part of L’Automatisme psychologique, Janet examined what he called actes subconscients – subconscious acts – before turning to désagrégation psychologique and then to les existences psychologiques simultanées, or simultaneous psychological existences (Janet, 1889, pp. 224, 305–314). These were not merely poetic labels. Janet was attempting to account for cases in which psychologically organised activities appeared capable of proceeding without being incorporated into the person’s ordinary field of conscious awareness. The original volume explicitly places “psychological disaggregation” at p. 305 and “simultaneous psychological existences” from p. 314 onward.

Janet’s broader theory depended upon what he called a restriction or narrowing of the field of consciousness. Material that was not adequately synthesised into the principal personal consciousness could nevertheless continue to participate in perception, memory and action. His clinical cases were therefore important historically because they challenged the simple equation:

not consciously known = psychologically inactive.

Janet’s own interpretation was closely bound to dissociation and psychopathology. We should preserve that context. The fact that organised subconscious activity occurred in Janet’s patients does not establish that ordinary psychological multiplicity is itself dissociative. Indeed, treating the two as equivalent would reproduce exactly the assumption this thesis intends to investigate: that internal differentiation becomes psychologically meaningful only once it becomes pathological.

What Janet does establish historically is a weaker proposition. Psychological organisation may continue outside the particular synthesis that the person ordinarily experiences as conscious selfhood. His observations therefore open a conceptual distinction between the whole of psychologically active organisation and that portion presently represented within the dominant conscious field.

That distinction will matter considerably later, but at this point we need not supply it with a new mechanism. Janet’s work simply demonstrates that the difficulty was already visible by the late nineteenth century.

Freud and a mind organised around internal difference

Freud approached the problem differently. His mature structural model divided mental organisation into the ego, id and superego. These agencies were not separate persons, and Freud did not treat them as equivalent centres of consciousness. They were theoretical structures distinguished by their functions, developmental origins and relationships to instinct, reality and morality.

For the present argument, Freud is useful precisely because his model is so familiar that its radical implication can be overlooked. A theory can regard a person as one individual while nevertheless explaining behaviour through different internal organisations with potentially conflicting demands.

In The Ego and the Id, Freud distinguished the ego from the id partly through the different functions he attributed to them. In the Standard Edition translation, he described the ego as representing “reason and common sense” in contrast with the passions attributed to the id (Freud, 1923/1961, p. 25). More generally, the chapter in which Freud develops the ego–id distinction occupies pp. 19–33 of the English text, making it possible to inspect the distinction without relying upon a textbook summary of psychoanalysis.

The later addition of the superego complicated this organisation still further. Mental conflict could now be conceptualised as arising not simply because “the person” inconsistently wanted two things, but because different aspects of mental organisation stood in different relations to instinctual demand, external reality and internalised prohibition.

This does not make Freud an early Human Multiplicity theorist. His structural agencies are highly abstract theoretical constructs. The id is not a self-aspect in the sense that will be developed later, and it would be especially misleading to imagine three miniature people – Id, Ego and Superego – negotiating inside the head.

Freud’s relevance is methodological. He helped make internal differentiation scientifically respectable. Once a psychological theory explains behaviour through structures with different functions, information and pressures, the assumption that all meaningful mental activity must belong to one homogeneous psychological actor has already been abandoned.

Yet Freud’s model retained a relatively central role for the ego. The ego may be divided, partly unconscious and subject to forces it does not control, but it remains the principal organisation through which external reality is negotiated. The historical development becomes more interesting with Jung because the relationship between the conscious ego and other psychological organisations becomes considerably less hierarchical.

Jung’s complexes and the problem of relative autonomy

Jung’s theory of complexes grew partly from his word-association experiments at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital. Subjects were given stimulus words and asked to respond as quickly as possible. Delays, unusual responses, forgetting and emotional disturbance were not distributed randomly. They tended to cluster around affectively charged themes. Jung came to describe these constellations as feeling-toned complexes.

The importance of the complex was not merely that emotionally related memories could be grouped together. Jung increasingly treated complexes as organised psychological formations whose activation could interfere with conscious intention.

In A Review of the Complex Theory, he argued that a constellated complex could disrupt memory, association and voluntary performance and emphasised the uncomfortable fact that people do not merely have complexes; complexes can, in a meaningful psychological sense, “have us” (Jung, 1934/1969, p. 96). He then described complexes as “splinter psyches,” emphasising their coherence and relative independence from the ordinary conscious attitude (pp. 97–98). These page references are specific to the Princeton/Bollingen edition of The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, in which A Review of the Complex Theory occupies pp. 92–104.

Elsewhere in the same volume, Jung stated the point even more strongly. Discussing psychological factors in human behaviour, he observed that complexes can interfere with conscious intention, influence speech and action, and behave “like independent beings” (Jung, 1946/1969, p. 121). The expression should not be stripped of its qualification. Jung did not thereby claim that every complex was literally another complete human person. He was describing the phenomenological autonomy with which a complex may operate: it can produce effects that the ego neither deliberately initiates nor readily controls.

This is a more important development for the present thesis than Freud’s structural agencies because Jung’s complex begins to resemble an organised centre of psychological activity rather than merely an abstract explanatory division.

The distinction can be illustrated without adopting Jung’s full theory. Imagine someone who is ordinarily articulate and confident but becomes strangely confused whenever a particular subject arises. They may forget obvious facts, interpret neutral remarks defensively and later wonder why they behaved so differently. A unitary description says that the person became irrational. A complex-based description asks whether a particular affectively organised configuration became active and temporarily altered which memories, interpretations and responses were most available.

The second description does not absolve the individual of responsibility, nor does it require another consciousness to have taken control. It simply places the variation in a more specific psychological structure.

This is the meaning of relative autonomy that we require at this stage. A psychological organisation is relatively autonomous when it can maintain characteristic tendencies and influence experience or behaviour without being wholly initiated or controlled by the conscious ego. Relative is essential. A complex is not necessarily sealed off from the rest of the person; nor is autonomy synonymous with complete independence.

Jung’s formulation is therefore a major historical bridge. Conscious egohood ceases to provide an adequate boundary around everything psychologically organised. The psyche can contain centres of activity that are both of the person and not identical with the person’s ordinary ego-consciousness.

The distinction also complicates the idea that multiplicity is inherently pathological. Jung developed his theory through clinical material, but complexes were not confined to severe illness. The difference between ordinary and pathological functioning could involve degree, relationship and autonomy rather than the mere existence of differentiated organisation. Jung’s language becomes dramatic when complexes become strongly dissociated, but the underlying concept is not restricted to psychosis.

That observation will matter in the following chapter when we distinguish multiplicity from fragmentation.

From hidden complexes to a dialogical self

Jung’s complexes entered psychology through depth psychology and the study of unconscious processes. Dialogical Self Theory reached plurality by a very different route.

In 1992, Hubert Hermans, Harry Kempen and Rens van Loon proposed that the self could be understood as a “dynamic multiplicity” of relatively autonomous I-positions. Their model combined William James’s distinction between the I and the Me with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel. Instead of imagining one central narrator describing a single, fixed self, the same person could occupy different positions and give each a distinctive voice.

The crucial passage appears on p. 28 of their original article. The authors describe the I as able to move among positions according to situation and time, including positions that may be opposed to one another. Those positions can be imaginatively endowed with voices so that dialogical relationships become possible between them (Hermans, Kempen, & van Loon, 1992, p. 28). On the following page, they develop the narrative analogy further: different positions can function like characters with different stories to tell, exchanging information about their respective perspectives and thereby contributing to a complex narrative self (p. 29).

This is strikingly close to some of the ordinary language with which Chapter 1 began. Part of me wants this; another part objects becomes, in Dialogical Self Theory, a psychological model in which differing positions can be given a voice and placed into relationship.

But the similarity again requires restraint.

An I-position is not the same theoretical object as a Jungian complex. Hermans and colleagues were principally developing a constructionist and narrative model of selfhood. Positions may be shaped by social relationships, culture and imagined others. The theory therefore operates at a different descriptive level from Jung’s affectively organised complexes.

Nor should we treat the phrase relatively autonomous as proof that both theories have discovered the same hidden entity under different names. Similar language can describe different mechanisms.

What matters is that the historical convergence has widened. We are no longer dealing only with nineteenth and early twentieth-century clinical observations. A modern theory of ordinary selfhood can explicitly describe the self as containing multiple positions that may differ, oppose one another and enter dialogue.

This makes one conclusion increasingly difficult to avoid: psychological unity cannot simply be defined as the absence of internal difference.

A person may instead achieve continuity through relationships among differences.

Parts approaches and the explicit normalisation of multiplicity

Parts-oriented psychotherapies make this proposition still more explicit. The term parts work covers several approaches rather than one unified theory, and their differences should not be concealed. Ego-state approaches, Voice Dialogue, Internal Family Systems and other models do not share an identical psychology simply because all employ the language of parts.

Internal Family Systems is particularly relevant because Richard Schwartz makes natural multiplicity an explicit premise of the model rather than merely a technique used during therapy.

In a concise model handout produced under Schwartz’s name, parts are described as “subpersonalities or aspects of our personality” that interact internally in ways resembling interpersonal relationships. The same document states that people are born with parts or their potential and that “it is the nature of the mind to be subdivided”; multiplicity itself is presented positively, while life experience is proposed as the reason parts may become extreme or destructive (Schwartz, n.d., p. 1).

That is a considerably stronger claim than anything this thesis needs to accept at this stage.

IFS proposes not only that internal multiplicity is normal, but that parts possess characteristic perspectives and roles, interact systemically, become polarised, and can recover less extreme functions. It also proposes a distinct Self capable of leading the internal system.

These claims belong to the specific ontology and clinical method of IFS. They should not be silently incorporated into Human Multiplicity Theory simply because some of the language is attractive.

The overlap is nonetheless significant.

IFS makes a conceptual move that earlier clinical models often did not: it separates multiplicity itself from what has happened to the relationships among the multiple elements.

A troubled internal system does not necessarily prove that the existence of parts caused the trouble. Within IFS, the problem may instead involve extreme roles, burdens or polarisation. Schwartz and Sweezy’s later clinical text continues to describe parts as interacting within a system and psychological suffering as arising in part through the relationships and polarisation among them rather than from plurality alone (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2020, especially chs. 2, 4 and 11). The publisher’s description of the second edition similarly identifies the interaction and polarisation of subpersonalities as central to the model.

For our purposes, this is a decisive conceptual shift.

If multiplicity is treated as normal, the central psychological question changes. Instead of asking:

How do we eliminate the many and restore the One?

we can ask:

What distinguishes a functioning multiplicity from a dysfunctional one?

That question will become central in Chapter 3.

Convergence does not establish identity

We can now see why historical comparison requires particular discipline.

Janet observed psychologically organised activity outside ordinary conscious synthesis, especially in dissociative conditions. Freud constructed a model of differentiated agencies with conflicting functions. Jung described affectively organised complexes capable of relative autonomy from the conscious ego. Hermans and colleagues described a dialogical self capable of occupying differing and even opposed I-positions. IFS explicitly proposes that the mind is naturally multiple and that problems arise when parts become burdened, extreme or polarised.

It would be tempting to arrange these into a simple sequence and claim that each theorist was progressively discovering the same underlying psychological structure.

The evidence does not justify that conclusion.

Their objects of study differ. Their methods differ. Their assumptions about consciousness, development and pathology differ. Their theories operate at different levels of description.

The more defensible conclusion is one of convergence at the level of the problem.

Across more than a century of psychology, attempts to account for the organisation of the self have repeatedly encountered phenomena that strain a simple model of a homogeneous conscious agent. Psychological activity can occur without being represented in ordinary consciousness. Different structures may exert conflicting demands. Affectively organised complexes may behave with relative autonomy. Different self-positions may speak from different perspectives. Parts-oriented approaches may treat internal plurality as a normal condition of mind.

None of these findings proves the architecture that will be proposed later in this thesis.

They do, however, remove the appearance that psychological multiplicity is an eccentric premise requiring us to abandon psychology before beginning.

The more accurate situation is almost the reverse. Psychology has repeatedly permitted plurality, but has interpreted it according to the needs of each theoretical tradition.

The unresolved question is what value should be placed upon that plurality.

Janet’s most dramatic examples were tied to disaggregation and dissociation. Freud’s agencies were organised around conflict and management. Jung granted complexes considerable autonomy but still worked within a psychology concerned with the relationship of ego-consciousness to the wider psyche. IFS explicitly normalises multiplicity but retains an organising concept of Self-leadership.

This leaves a deeper question untouched.

Even when psychology acknowledges the many, does it still assume that psychological health must ultimately be measured by the authority of one preferred centre?

James Hillman challenged that assumption more directly than almost any other twentieth-century psychologist. His proposal of a polytheistic psychology did not merely concede that several psychological figures may exist. It questioned whether reducing them to a single governing perspective was psychologically desirable in the first place.

That is the problem to which we now turn.

References

Freud, S. (1923/1961). The ego and the id. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 1–66). Hogarth Press. Original work published 1923.

Hermans, H. J. M., Kempen, H. J. G., & van Loon, R. J. P. (1992). The dialogical self: Beyond individualism and rationalism. American Psychologist, 47(1), 23–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.47.1.23.

Janet, P. (1889). L’automatisme psychologique: Essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l’activité humaine. Félix Alcan.

Jung, C. G. (1969). A review of the complex theory. In The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 8, pp. 92–104). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1934).

Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychological factors in human behaviour. In The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 8). Princeton University Press.

Schwartz, R. C. (n.d.). Internal Family Systems Model: Glossary and concepts [Handout]. Center for Self Leadership, p. 1.

Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.